Explorations in Go: solving the Instagram engineering challenge

Here's another one in 178 lines of Go: https://gist.github.com/1371135

So long as we're doing this, here's a solution in ~73 lines of Ruby: https://gist.github.com/1375695.

Here's a solution in ~50 lines of Python: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3249937

It seems a lot of people used the challenge to try out new languages. I wonder if Instagram received a disproportionate amount of entries in Scala, Haskell, Go..etc.

Totally. Two classes of respondent: people who thought, hm, fun, I'll use this as an excuse to dig into a new language, and folks who were looking for a job.

I really just wanted a t-shirt but got there too late :)

Folks interesting in silly excuses to learn new languages (and networking libraries) might also enjoy our 'hellod' project: https://github.com/carbonfive/hellod

We implement high-performance HTTP "hello, world" servers.

So far we have implementations in C/libev, Clojure/aleph, Clojure/jetty, Erlang, Go, Java/netty, Java/nio, Node.js, and Ruby/eventmachine. :P

Oh goddamnit, I still haven't done this damn thing. And I was planning on doing it in Go too. Sad to hear that they're out of shirts.